The field of the invention is stereolithography, and more particularly improved stereolithography systems for manufacturing parts or objects more rapidly, reliably, accurately and economically.
It is common practice in the production of plastic parts or objects to first design the part and then produce a prototype of the part. This requires considerable time, effort and expense. For example, tooling or molds may be required, even to produce just the prototype. The design is then reviewed and often times the laborious and expensive process is again and again repeated until the design has been optimized. After design optimization, the next step is production. Most production plastic parts are injection molded. Since the design time and tooling costs are very high, plastic parts are often only practical in high volume production. While other processes are available for the production of plastic parts, including direct machine work, vacuum-forming and direct forming, such methods are typically only cost effective for short run production, and the parts produced are usually inferior in quality to molded parts.
Techniques have been developed in the past for making three-dimensional objects within a fluid medium. These techniques involve selectively curing the medium, e.g., a resin, with a beam of radiation. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,041,476; 4,078,229; 4,238,840 and 4,288,861 describe some of these techniques. All of these techniques or systems rely on the buildup of synergistic energization, or curing energy, at selected points deep within the volume of the fluid medium, to the exclusion of all other points in the fluid volume. These systems, however, encounter a number of problems with resolution and exposure control. The loss of radiation intensity and image forming resolution of the focused spots of the beam, as they are directed deeper into the fluid medium, create complex beam control situations. Absorption, diffusion, dispersion and diffraction all contribute to the difficulties of working deep within the fluid medium on an economical and reliable basis.
In recent years, "stereolithography" systems, such as those described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,575,330, which patent is incorporated herein by reference as if set forth herein in full, have come into use. Stereolithography is a method for automatically building simple or complex parts (e.g., plastic parts) by successively "printing" cross-sections or layers of a solidified fluid-like building material on top of each other, with all of the layers joined together to form a whole part. The building material may be, for example, a photopolymer which is solidifiable upon exposure to UV radiation or the like. Powder materials, which form a solidified mass when sintered by conducted or radiated heat from a heated element or source of IR radiation or the like, and powders which are solidifiable by the addition of a reactive chemical such as a binder, may also be utilized. This method of fabrication is extremely powerful for quickly reducing design ideas to physical form and for making prototypes.
One type of useful fluid medium, photocurable polymers (photopolymers) change from liquid to solid when exposed to light. Their photospeed under ultraviolet light (UV) is fast enough to make them practical building materials. The material that is not polymerized when a part is made is still usable and remains in the vat as successive parts are made. In one embodiment an ultraviolet laser generates a small intense spot of UV. This spot is moved across the liquid surface with a galvanometer mirror X-Y scanner. The scanner is driven by computer generated vectors. After each successive surface is exposed by the laser, an elevator lowers the object further into the vat and allows another layer of fresh liquid to cover the surface of the object for formation of the next layer. Precise complex patterns can be rapidly produced with this technique.
The laser, scanner, photopolymer vat and elevator, along with a controlling computer and possibly a separate computer for creating appropriate cross-sectional data from initially supplied three-dimensional data, combine together to form a stereolithography apparatus, referred to as an "SLA". An SLA is programmed to automatically make a part by drawing its various cross-sections, one layer at a time, and building the part up layer-by-layer.
Stereolithography does not use tooling, molds, dies, etc. Since it depends on using a computer to generate cross-sectional layers or patterns, an SLA can be readily linked (i.e., a data link) to computer aided design as a computer aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) apparatus.
Many photopolymers have a "minimum solidifiable thickness," i.e., a minimum thickness below which they cannot be sufficiently cured to form unsupported regions of transformed, cohesive material. For example, with presently preferred fluid photopolymers, if an attempt is made to try to form a feature of an object having a thickness less than the minimum solidifiable depth (MSD) or thickness, that feature will either simply fail to sufficiently solidify to become part of the object, or it will slump (i.e., fail to hold its shape) when the object or individual layer is moved relative to the vat of fluid photopolymer. The minimum solidifiable thickness of a building medium (e.g. photopolymer) is not only a characteristic of the building medium or material itself but it also depends on the synergistic stimulation source chosen (e.g. the solidifying radiation such as ultraviolet light) and the environmental conditions surrounding the material. For example, oxygen absorbed in a photopolymer can act as a reaction inhibitor. Therefore, as used herein, "MSD" refers to the minimum solidification depth obtainable with a given material/solidification environment combination.
Stereolithography makes objects layer by layer. Since the MSD is the minimum solidification depth for forming unsupported regions of layers (i.e., down-facing features of the object), these regions must be given a cure depth of at least the MSD regardless of the thickness between individual layers or cross-sections from which the object is being formed. Therefore, due to the layer by layer formation process, even if the layers being used are thinner than the MSD, the accuracy of the stereolithographically reproduced object is limited by the MSD of the material being used.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to overcome this limitation by providing a method and apparatus of practicing high resolution stereolithography when using a fluid-like building material that is inherently incapable of making unsupported thicknesses of solidified material as thin as the desired accuracy when solidified by the chosen synergistic stimulation.